I’ve been reading Rick Atkinson’s Liberation Triology, a stack of hefty histories about the war in North Africa, Sicily, Italy, and Western Europe. I covered the lovely ceremony (you can read about it elsewhere in this newspaper) which awarded six veterans with Cape Cod ties with the French Legion of Honor on the 70th anniversary of D-Day. Also, someone gave me copies of some articles filed by journalist Ernie Pyle from the front.

It was frustrating to try to write about that D-Day ceremony in just 600 words (the guideline for Patriot articles) because there was so much to report and only so much space in which to do it. So in addition to the story and photos you can see on other pages of this issue, I offer here a few more observations.

Time has moved on to the extent that the personable young French consul who pinned those medals on those veterans told me in an interview afterward, “It’s always very powerful to meet with those people” – meaning the vets -- “because I heard about those people in school.” D-Day, he said, “was the first day of our liberation…we want to tell them that we’ll never forget.”

There was a daughter of a man now gone before who testified, “I only saw my father weep three times – and it was always about the children of France. He would trade his cigarettes to buy them candy.” And a grandson of one the living, who thanked the people who were observing “a time I can’t remember in a war you can’t forget.” And the Vietnam vet and former professional in veteran affairs who offered, “You people taught me how to be a soldier and a serviceman.” And the woman who, as she slowly negotiated the stairs to the parking lot at the end of the luncheon, said of the event, “That was heartwarming.”

As to the Atkinson series, one of the first things I learned was about a painting that has hung first in my parents’ house and now in mine.

I only knew that my father said that he had it shipped home from North Africa during the war and it was of a port called Mers el-Kebir. He always joked about it because he said that the ship it depicted seemed to be floating out of the water.

Turns out, I learned from Atkinson, that Mers el-Kabir was a place where, he writes, there was a fleet of French ships allied with Vichy: “[L]est the French ships fall into German hands, the captains were told to sail for Britain or a neutral port. When the ultimatum was rejected, the British opened fire. In five minutes, they slaughtered 1,200 French sailors.” Now it’s not just a painting to me.

Then I have those WWII writings from journalist Ernie Pyle; I’ve actually visited his house. which is now a museum in Albuquerque, New Mexico. One of his dispatches describes his walk down the beaches of Normandy just days after D-Day, looking at what he called “human litter.”

Among the stuff he finds, “toothbrushes and razors, and snapshots of families back home,” he finds “a pocket Bible with a soldier’s name in it…I carried it half a mile or so and then put it back down on the beach. I don’t know why I picked it up, or why I put it back down.”

I have such a Bible too. My father’s: Sgt. S. Chahey, he wrote at the top of the cover, and apparently meant to record his travels in North Africa and Europe.

He wasn’t at D-Day itself, but in these places that he lists in his own hand on the cover of this khaki-bound, zippered Scripture: Oran, Algiers, Bizerta (sic), Naples, Cassino, Rome, Siena, Marseille, Nancy.

And then he stops using that Bible to record where he went. I guess that a list that ended at the liberation of Dachau was just too ugly to remember.

Recently, I had the blessed chance to introduce a high school student to a friend of mine who as a 10-year-old escaped Nazi Germany on the Kindertransport and whose mother died in the Holocaust. The encounter, which seemed meaningful to them both, offered one moment of peace for me as I keep trying to comprehend a world and a war that happened before I was conceived but that will haunt me as long as I live.